התמלול המלא של NN#7: A New Climate Catechism

WEBVTT 00:00:06.800 --> 00:00:31.530 You're listening to the Nelder Notes Podcast, a feature for Transition Time subscribers. I'm your host, Chris Nelder. This is episode seven titled A New Climate Catechism. You can also find this content in newsletter form at transitiontimes.net. According to legend, on 10/31/1517, Martin Luther nailed a copy of his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. 00:00:31.610 --> 00:01:17.875 It was a list of questions and propositions for debate, delivered in an academic fashion, questioning the commonplace practice of the day in which the church sold indulgences, relieving penitence of the punishment for their sins. Luther, building upon Augustine, believed that salvation comes by God's grace through faith rather than through human deeds and objected to the practice. His arguments eventually fractured the Catholic church and helped to launch the Protestant Reformation. The new Protestant denomination believed that ordinary people could have a direct relationship with the divine without mediation through clergy. On 07/20/2026, doctor Emily Grubert, an associate professor at Notre Dame University in Indiana, published a perspective piece in the journal Environmental Research Letters that had a similar resonance, at least for me. 00:01:18.275 --> 00:02:33.730 Whether it leads to a reformation of energy and climate research remains to be seen, but I hope it does because that priesthood is overdue for a shake up. Like Catholic doctrine of the sixteenth century, which over centuries had become an accretion of theological refinements, devotional practices, and institutional traditions that obscured the gospel, energy and climate science has become a sprawling thicket of its own accumulated concepts, an untended garden where the desirable specimens are all but buried beneath a thick mass of weeds. Lord help the climate penitent who would wade into that canon in search of clear guidance. In fact, it was only after many years of studying the body of climate science and trying to understand what it says and how it works that I finally realized the stunning truth. Honest researchers who are generally doing their level best to get their work right, developing tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of careful detailed models and doing millions of model runs using different parameters, employing the most extensive data sets and sophisticated computer programs and powerful computers available are not even trying to produce a model that actually tries to predict accurately what the likely course of the energy system, the biggest determinant of climate, will be in an age of climate change. 00:02:33.970 --> 00:03:02.380 Not one. That's not what energy and climate modeling is for. What the models are designed to do, broadly speaking, is to answer what if questions, to explore the range of outcomes that might obtain under various assumptions. They use scenarios to try to capture the complexity of how systems might evolve. Some of those scenarios might be labeled as business as usual or reference scenarios, and those scenarios are often misinterpreted to be projections designed to paint a probable future, but they are not. 00:03:02.380 --> 00:03:17.275 They're just scenarios with no probabilities assigned. So many scenarios, none of which are ever labeled as likely or probable. Now that works well for modelers. If your scenario turns out to be unrealistic, no big deal. It's just a scenario. 00:03:17.355 --> 00:03:46.315 And if your scenario turns out to be accurate, you get some credit. It's all reward and no risk. But if you're a policymaker or a layperson and not a modeler of climate or energy systems, what you really want to know is what's going to happen? I'd argue that that's all outside the modeling community really wants to know. So the one scenario that everybody actually wants to understand, the one that is likely to happen, is the one that no modeler wants to produce. 00:03:47.280 --> 00:04:54.810 There's a long and convoluted history of how climate modeling got the way it is, and here I am mainly referring to the suite of representative concentration pathways or RCPs, shared socioeconomic pathways or SSPs, and integrated assessment models or IAMs used in the framework developed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC which are then used to simulate the Physical Climate and Earth System Models or ESMs or Global Climate Models (GCMs). There are other modeling systems and frameworks for climate and energy analysis, but as far as I know, nobody uses them to tell us what's likely either. Over the years, I attempted to distill this complex framework and methodology down for a lay audience in our climate science miniseries on the energy transition show, so you can explore that if you wanna learn more about it. For a single episode summary, try episode 51. Many of the other episodes in that miniseries delve into the disconnects between the modeling world and the real world. If you're a climate scientist and you've been trained up over many years of study within it, the IPCC framework makes sense. 00:04:54.970 --> 00:05:17.295 There are good reasons for why it has evolved the way it has, and and the results of that work are, by and large, trustworthy, at least for the objectives they were designed to achieve. But giving the world accurate guidance on how the global energy and climate systems are likely to evolve, given all that we know about those systems, isn't actually one of those objectives. I know. It's crazy. Mind boggling. 00:05:17.820 --> 00:05:30.700 I had to keep asking the scientists myself. Really? Amid these millions of model runs, there isn't one that attempts to project what is actually going to happen to us? This seemed unfathomable. But there isn't. 00:05:31.655 --> 00:05:54.000 Now there definitely could be. I don't think there's anything standing in the way of it